So I’m not normally a fan of metal bands, although I have to respect anyone that can play the guitar with their teeth. I am, however, a total slave to a spectacle, so a lot of shows slip into my schedule on entertainment value alone. Not everything you listen to has to be artsy and groundbreaking, and if you stretch the meaning of the word, a guy on stage eating a duck can be considered experimental. It’s definitely popular, look at Gwar, Ozzy, Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden. For extra snob-solace, we can even call it Performance Art.

There’re a few times a year when death metal is particularly relevant and meaningful to the masses. Obviously Alice is wafting through the air on the last day of school, and thursday nights sucked until Sebastian Bach joined the cast of Gilmore Girls, but nothing turns the entire population of America into black-clad children of the night like Halloween. Look around you on October 31st, and I guarantee you see at least 5 Gene Simmonses and no less than 3 Ace Frehleys.

Last night marked my officially becoming a New York resident as our 6 giant crates of records were lugged up five flights of stairs to our new (overpriced) Brooklyn Heights digs. It’s Halloween, all my shit is in New York, and where am I? Oh yea, I’m in Philadelphia about to take part in one of the rowdiest celebrations of a great pagan holiday that the city of brotherly blood has to offer. I’ve heard campfire tales of actual hangings on stage, animal decapitation, and some scary motherfucking costumes. New York can wait ’till tomorrow, cause Halloween is a holiday best spent in a city as dark and dingy as an Edward Gorey print. We have warewolves and vampires roaming our streets every night of the week, so on the actual 31st, we have to step it up.

I eschew the costume for journalistic integrity, and march into the Khyber ready to see some grisly shit. Three hours later I’m starting to believe that maybe I got my hopes up too high. The combination of sloppy crepe paper and the fact that the decorations on the wall actually say SPOOKY instead of just being spooky all just screams, “LAME!!!”

There are some good costumes, but they’re not on the stage. In fact, the only thing that goes on on the stage are 7 crappy bands from Jersey screaming and spitting fake blood and two crappy bands from Philly screaming and pushing each other. They have all the ingredients for a great show, butchers’ aprons, guitars, and Satan as their co-pilot, but the sad fact is that the most dangerous thing they do is spray the whole crowd with silly string after we’d all been warned to keep a fire extinguisher behind the sound board. At the end of it all, I am severely dissapointed.

I guess at shows like this, the real spectacle is always the crowd. Jombie was there, as was Alf. And I wasn’t aware that the tooth fairy was a slut, but I could see her nipples. One of the pirates drank so much grog that he ate it into a big pile of beer-soaked cast-off blond wigs, and that was pretty funny. Doesn’t make up for the spectacle defecit, but I’ll take it. Next year, I’m going on a hayride.

Give the Author Some Feedback!